Tag: situationism

Situationism: Laughter from the Empyrean

John Michael Greer302 Comments

Tolerably often, when I’m reading any of the documents that came out of the original Situationist International, I end up feeling as though the author is caught up in a desperate struggle between his own Marxist presuppositions and the world as it actually exists. That’s common enough in 20th century Marxist literature from outside the…

Situationism: Understanding the Spectacle

John Michael Greer416 Comments

Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of…

Situationism: A Voice From The Fringes

John Michael Greer402 Comments

There’s much to be learned from studying movements that thought they were the wave of the future, and weren’t. To begin with, there’s a distinctive tone of strident triumphalism that most movements doomed to fail seem to adopt, some at the very beginning of their trajectories, others once they pass their peak and start down…

The Narrative Trap

John Michael Greer409 Comments

One of the experiences I’ve had tolerably often, over the more than nineteen years that I’ve been writing these weekly essays, is the discovery that a series of apparently disconnected posts I’ve written were all talking about the same thing. Yes, that’s happened again. It’s going to take some work to trace out the connection…